The aim of this project was to investigate the proposal that children’s acquisition of complex linguistic constraints can be satisfactorily explained only in terms of their developing social, cognitive, and pragmatic knowledge and abilities (and not, as has often been assumed, by hardwired innate principles). Take, for example, a sentence like Samuel talked to Oliver about himself. Does himself mean “Samuel” or “Oliver” here? Across 10 adult studies and a single child study, we showed that – far from being determined solely by hardwired grammatical principles – the most likely interpretation, for these and related sentences, varies according to the listener’s implicit reasoning about the speaker’s intentions. For example:

If a speaker says Someone (c.f., Samuel) told Oliver about himself, then the speaker clearly intends the listener to infer that the identity of the teller is unknown and/or unimportant; thus, himself probably refers to Oliver.
Samuel is more likely to tell Oliver about Samuel, than to tell Oliver about Oliver, simply because people know more about themselves than other people. Thus, if a speaker says Samuel told Oliver about himself, then – all other things being equal – they most plausibly meant himself to refer to Samuel, simply because that is the more likely real-world scenario.
A lawyer is more likely to interview a suspect about the suspect (e.g., “Where were you at 8 pm on 15th October?”) than about the lawyer (e.g., “How has my defence been so far?”) (i.e., The lawyer grilled the suspect about himself [=the suspect]). Conversely, a suspect is more likely to tell a lawyer about the suspect (e.g., “I was at home, as my wife can testify”) than about the lawyer (“You’re a great lawyer!”) (i.e., The suspect told the lawyer about himself [=the suspect]).

This research joins a growing body of work which suggests that linguistic phenomena traditionally attributed to highly abstract (and possibly innate) grammatical principles can often fall naturally out of functional-pragmatic considerations: what the speakers most likely intended to convey. The practical implication is that the most promising interventions for children who struggle with complex linguistic constraints is not training in abstract syntactic principles, but training and practice in understanding how language is used to convey communicative goals.

Project Team 

Ben Ambridge (lead), Liam Blything, Silke Brandt, Anna Theakston 

Duration 

3 years, starting March 2021 

Project Number 

2.1 

Selected Publications

Blything, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., & Ambridge, B. (2025). Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation: Evidence from nine pre-registered rating studies. Cognitive Psychology, 158, Article 101733 

Blything, R., Theakston, A.L., Brandt, S. & Ambridge, B. (Submitted). “He has juice all over him(self)”: The role of functional-pragmatic constraints on 6- to 7-year-olds’ and adults’ use of reflexive and non-reflexive object pronouns. Language Development Research.

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